The Passage of Power (82 page)

At least on Sunday some of the banner headlines had been about Johnson. Not so on Monday. Most of Monday’s banners didn’t even mention Lyndon Johnson.
PRESIDENT’S ASSASSIN SHOT TO DEATH IN JAIL CORRIDOR BY DALLAS CITIZEN; GRIEVING THRONGS VIEW KENNEDY
were the headlines across the top of the front page of the
New York Times,
for example. None of the stories at the top of that front page were about him. The two huge pictures on the page were of Caroline putting her hand under the flag and of Oswald grimacing as Ruby shot him, the detective next to Oswald aghast, his mouth open in shock. The
Washington Post
’s photos were of the grimace and the grays, as the horses pulled the caisson away from the White House. Johnson barely made the front page of that paper at all; the only story on the activities of the new President was squeezed onto the bottom of the page. Television reported on his activities but television was the realm of the picture, and what pictures could compare with the tape of Oswald’s shooting, which was shown over and over that day, or with the live coverage of the incredible procession and the funeral and the foreign leaders following the coffin and the Kennedys? “The drama” of the three days following Jack Kennedy’s assassination “centered on the flag-draped catafalque in the East Room,”
Hugh Sidey was to write. “Beyond the legend of the dead Kennedy which was then being magnified in every hamlet was the presence of the Kennedy family. Johnson could not compete with them.… The great and the near-great came in waves for three days.
Charles de Gaulle was a more imposing and fascinating figure than the new President.” Then there were Selassie, Macapagal, “Germany’s
Ludwig Erhard, Queen Frederika, Ireland’s marvelous old De Valera, … Mikoyan. Lyndon Johnson had less glamour than any of them.” During those three days, he “stayed in his old office … only on the edge of the drama.”

He would stay in his own home, too. Asked by reporters when the Johnsons would be moving into the executive mansion at the White House, Lady Bird replied,
“I
would to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort. I can at least serve her convenience.” Jacqueline and her children would move out on December 6th, the Johnsons would move in the following day. And although the address of The Elms was being printed in newspapers and television was showing pictures of the house during those three days, the number of persons standing outside remained surprisingly small. The President of the United States was living there—and, during those three days, the world didn’t seem particularly interested.

But for anyone who cared about the art of governing, about political power—about the art of assuming, and employing, power in sudden, unexpected, without warning, crisis; about governing a nation, soothing its fears, restoring its confidence, keeping it on course and moving in such a crisis; about governing with hardly a moment for preparation—for anyone who cared about that, what was happening in EOB 274 during those three days was memorable, too.

S
OME OF THE ITEMS
on the list Valenti had scribbled in Lyndon Johnson’s bedroom were ceremonial, symbolic: to demonstrate appropriate respect on the part of the new President—respect for God: infrequent though his visits to church had been, one should be made on Saturday; respect for his living predecessors: not merely to telephone but to meet face-to-face with the two (Truman and Eisenhower) physically able to come to Washington (and to elicit from Eisenhower, still the most popular Republican in the country, an expression of support to foster the picture of unity he wanted to paint). Some were to demonstrate sympathy—“Call widow of Officer Tippett [
sic
],” Valenti’s list said, and of course there would have to be ceremonial calls on another widow as well—some to demonstrate continuity (and to get briefings on the international situation) by conferring with, and being photographed conferring with, prominent members of the late President’s Cabinet, in particular Rusk and McNamara. Some items were both symbolic and substantive: a foreign affairs briefing in the White House Situation Room. These items were quickly arranged and easily scripted. There wasn’t much time on Saturday for church, but the most convenient house of worship—St. John’s Episcopal Church, right across Lafayette Square—was also the most appropriate: it was called “the Church of Presidents” because many of them had worshiped there. After a visit to St. John’s pastor to request a special memorial service for John F. Kennedy that the new President would attend, the Secret Service assured
Juanita Roberts, as she put it in a memo to Johnson, that “Services will be simple and will last approximately ten minutes.” Since Johnson’s attendance mustn’t appear to be a bid for publicity but rather a simple expression of sorrow and faith, presidential panoply would be kept to a minimum, her memo assured him. While there would be a full complement of Secret Service agents inside the church, only one “will be on the street in front at time of arrival.” He “will meet the President and Mrs. Johnson, take them into the church. Rev. Harper will lead the President and Mrs. Johnson down the aisle to second row. Turn left for sitting in the center.”

Bill Lloyd, one of Johnson’s aides, had drafted talking points for the call to
Marie Tippit, widow of the Dallas police officer Oswald had killed, and Valenti had redrafted them: “Mrs. Tippit, I know that words are not very useful when your grief runs so deep. But Mrs. Johnson and I wanted you to know that you and your children, Allen, Brenda Kay and Curtis Ray, are in our thoughts and prayers.” Colonel Roberts put a slip in front of him. “Mrs. Tippit is at the … funeral home now arranging for the funeral. She will be home after 1 pm, EST.” In his call, Johnson made the words more personal; “I just want to say ‘God bless you,’ and I know you’re a brave and a great lady,” he concluded. “I certainly appreciate your praise of him. It’s quite a consolation,” Marie Tippit replied. “Could I get your address there?” Johnson said. “I want to drop you a little note too,” and he scrawled an outline for Valenti to flesh out.

Johnson began to move down the list with the briefings on the international situation, and here, in a tour d’horizon from
Bundy and
CIA director John A. McCone in the Situation Room, the news was good, with no sign that any foreign country was attempting to exploit the assassination—no troubling movement anywhere, not in Cuba, not in Vietnam (
“It
was,” Johnson was to say later, “almost as if the world had provided a breathing space within which I could concentrate on domestic affairs”). McCone explained the “President’s Checklist” (
“with
which,” he noted in a confidential memo for CIA files, Johnson “was not familiar”), the summary of international developments prepared by the CIA each morning for the President’s information. To Johnson’s request that he stay on as director, he simply replied he would do so, as did the next person Johnson conferred with: Secretary of State Rusk.

While he was talking to Rusk in 274’s conference room, however, Colonel Roberts came in and handed him a note—“J. Edgar Hoover is calling on the White House line”—and throughout that day he would be interrupted by a torrent of calls from Hoover and McCone about new “developments” in the
FBI and CIA investigations of Oswald: that in the past few weeks the assassin had visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, for example.

And all that day, Saturday, November 23—and during the next two days—there would be other new developments for which no script had been prepared, but about which decisions had to be made.

It had been expected, of course, that some world leaders would attend the funeral, but Bundy, repeatedly ducking in and out of EOB 274 those three days, kept adding names to the list—until it was obvious that leaders would be arriving in Washington in unprecedented numbers; one after another was notifying the State Department that he was coming.
“There
will be de Gaulle, Erhard, Douglas-Home—separate category, Mikoyan,”
¹
Bundy said in one call; scores were coming; Johnson would not be able to meet with all of them individually after the funeral; but did he want to meet with some of them, and if so, which
ones?; it was important not to offend any—“I need your personal guidance on it.… It’s going to be awfully difficult to pick and choose here” but “I think in fact to have them come and go and
not
meet with you will be equally foolish.” And if he met with them, what, exactly, should he say to each one—in meetings in which every word counted? This was dangerous ground. These meetings would be foreign leaders’ first impression of Lyndon Johnson, and first impressions could influence the policy of nations; look at what had happened after Khrushchev, in Vienna, had met Kennedy for the first time! “Need to do,” Johnson scribbled on a notepad in front of him. “De Gaulle—Hume [
sic
]—Mikoyan.”

Then there was Congress: the stalemate of the Administration’s legislative program on many fronts, including civil rights and the intertwined budget and tax cut proposals that had been held up, month after month, in
Harry Byrd’s Senate Finance Committee.

Because of his exclusion from Kennedy’s legislative efforts, he didn’t know what he needed to know about the status of those proposals; much of what he knew—not only about the tax cut and civil rights stalemates but about the reasons behind the seeming paralysis on other fronts as well—he knew only because, as he had told Sorensen in June, he had “got it from the
New York Times.
” But it was his Administration now, his legislative program; he was going to be held responsible for its success or failure; he had to find out what the situation was on Capitol Hill.

To find out, he turned not to the Senate Leader,
Mike Mansfield, because he felt that would be no help, but to a senator who knew how to count. Johnson had, in fact, turned to the suave Floridian
George Smathers for help in counting before, during his time as Majority Leader, appointing him his “whip,” or Assistant Leader. The independent Smathers later refused Johnson’s request that he stay in the job, telling him flatly, “I don’t want to be your assistant.” (Johnson had flown into a rage. “What are you saying?” he demanded. To Smathers, “It was just as though you had unleashed an awful smell. His nostrils flared, his eyes sort of looked funny.”) Since Smathers’ counting ability (and unapologetic pragmatism) made him too keen-edged a tool to be discarded, however, Johnson had found another use for him—raiser and dispenser of campaign funds as chairman of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee—until the end of his time as Leader, and now, three years later, needing him again, he telephoned him at 2:10 on Saturday afternoon.

The purpose of the call was to obtain information, and “you don’t learn anything when you’re talking.” So, from Johnson, there wasn’t any talking. For ten minutes after Smathers began explaining the tax cut bill’s status, the only sounds Johnson made were noncommittal little grunts. And by the time Smathers finished, Johnson had learned that the situation was worse—far worse—than
Marquis Childs or
James Reston realized.

For one thing, he had learned that Byrd’s opposition to the
tax bill was
linked to his feelings about the budget Kennedy was to submit to Congress in January. Smathers, a member of Byrd’s Finance Committee, said that on Kennedy’s behalf he had gone to Byrd, and learned that what he “was really trying to accomplish [was] to hold up the tax bill until he could see and prove that” Kennedy’s budget would be “over a hundred billion dollars”—in other words, that if it was above that figure, he wouldn’t approve the tax cuts. Then Smathers had tried to broker a deal with Byrd under which “the President would … tell him now … what he thought his budget would be” (Treasury Secretary Dillon thought that getting it down to a figure not too far above $100 billion would satisfy Byrd—“Current expectations were for $101.5 billion to 102 billion,” Dillon was to tell Johnson—and apparently Kennedy did, too), and in return Byrd would speed up the committee’s hearings.
²
But that proposal had foundered, because, Smathers said, “he [Byrd] really doesn’t
want
it, you know. He’s really
against
the tax bill.” Then, Smathers said, he had, also on Kennedy’s behalf, tried to “go around Harry Byrd in the committee,” but going around a committee chairman was something very seldom done in the Senate—and never to Harry Byrd; although two Democratic members of the committee had pledged their votes to Smathers on the “going around” maneuver, after each had been summoned to a face-to-face meeting with Old Harry, each had withdrawn the pledge. Smathers had done some counting—of some of the seventeen committee members to ascertain how many votes the Administration proposals would have in a showdown with Byrd: not enough. “At the last legislative breakfast,” which Johnson, in Europe at the time, had not attended, the possibility of getting the tax bill to the floor had been raised, but Mansfield hadn’t been much help—he didn’t know “how many votes we got, I don’t know if the leadership isn’t in the dark”—and, in the crunch, neither was the President: “Kennedy was there; he wasn’t pushing it too hard,” Smathers said.

Johnson asked whether there was any possibility that Byrd would agree to deal with the proposed amendments to the bill in a “reasonable time” and “pass it this year”—before Congress adjourned for the Christmas vacation and the end of its 1963 session.

“I don’t think Byrd will … make that kind of an agreement,” Smathers replied. He told Johnson that in his opinion there was nothing that could be done about getting the tax reduction bill passed before Christmas. He himself, he said, evidently forgetting Dallas for a moment, but then catching himself in mid-phrase, would “do anything short of, you know,
anything
to try to get it passed.” But, he said, passing the bill before Congress adjourned would be simply impossible. There was so much “strong feeling” against the Kennedy measures not only in the committee but in Congress as a whole that Johnson should just abandon
the fight: perhaps “the smart thing to do … would be for you to get the appropriation[s] bill[s] through real quick, and then just” adjourn for the year.